About Neurobiology

The Department of Neurobiology in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA is a premier research department and a leading force in Neuroscience discovery and education at UCLA and worldwide. With diverse backgrounds in cellular and molecular biology, psychology, and engineering, faculty members in the Department utilize the most sophisticated technologies available to work in concert with colleagues throughout UCLA and the world to enhance the understanding of the brain and its role in health and disease.

History

Horace W. Magoun Biography (via BRI)

Recollections of Charles (Tom) Sawyer

Recollection of the Early Days of Gross Anatomy at UCLA
C. H. Sawyer, Emeritus Professor of Anatomy
written circa 1994-95 as a slide presentation
edited from original (brackets [ ] for additions and ellipses . . . for deletions)

Earl Eldred remembers the beginning of the UCLA Anatomy Department

The MD program at the University of Washington had been in existence for only a couple of years, when Dr. Horace “Ted” Magoun, an internationally well-known neuroanatomist at Northwestern, visited the UW Anatomy Department on his way to plan and organize the Anatomy Department at UCLA. My wife, Bergliot, who was working at UW as a research technician, encountered 'Ted' in the hall and responded to his inquiries about me. I had TA'd in his Anatomy Department at Northwestern where he had become aware of my interests and research. Soon after, I received a letter from him asking if I would be interested in joining the Anatomy Department about to emerge at UCLA. I replied, "Sure!" When my internship finished on June 31, 1951, Bergliot and I were on our way to UCLA. We stayed with the Magouns for a few days until finding an apartment.

Tom and Ruth Sawyer arrived a couple of months later. In 1951, Tom delivered the first of any medical school lecture to that class of ~20 students. For the next four years, I was knee deep in lecturing and cadavers in what had been a Religious Conference Building, when the first medical school building was born, into which Gross Anatomy was moved, along with each of our research labs.